This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The Moon has been a point of fascination in ...

Billions of years ago, so the theory goes, something around the size of Mars smacked into Earth, spewing a whole bunch of dirt into space that eventually coalesced to form the Moon. This is called the ...

Seismic waves created by earthquakes as they travel through the planet’s interior change speed and direction as they move through different materials. Things like rock type, density, and temperature ...

The conventional explanation for the moon's formation is that an enormous rock smashed into the nascent Earth and created it as a result. A new theory challenges the particulars of how events may have ...

Hubble Space Telescope images have revealed a second massive collision between planetary bodies orbiting the nearby star Fomalhaut, roughly 25 light-years from Earth. The discovery, reported in a peer ...

There's a new theory for how the Moon came to be that would solve some of the Giant Impact Hypothesis' issues. If Earth had a magma ocean on it already, a lot of problems work out. Share on Facebook ...

Scientists have shown how the freezing of a ‘slushy’ ocean of magma may be responsible for the composition of the Moon’s crust. The scientists, from the University of Cambridge and the Ecole normale ...